St Petroc's Parish Church, Bodmin, Cornwall

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On Monday, May 6th, we left Salisbury and after stopping to visit friends near Ilminster, we traveled the well-known route to Cornwall on A30, across the Moor in Devon (passing close to Bratton Clovelly and where the Eastlake Farm is located and where we will visit in a couple of weeks) to Lanhydrock Hotel in Bodmin, Cornwall. Just down the road we enter Bodmin passing the church featured on my Blog. We will return to visit as we have on all of our trips but after driving we are always happy to settle in our hotel (especially one that we know and love like Lanhydrock). Coming to Cornwall feels like coming home. The people are friendly helpful (like assisting with opening our gas tank lid on our very automatic rental car…the trick is to open the lid immediately after turning off the engine). Although we had lovely weather in Salisbury, the forecast is for wind and rain in Cornwall. Fortunately Tuesday was lovely (as they say over here) and the rain didn’t hit until Wednesday.

Russ and I arrived in Great Britain on May 1st. We stayed in Salisbury for 5 nights as a transition time getting over jet lag. Salisbury is one of our favorite cities and we have visited it on every one of our trips to the UK beginning in 1979, having discovered the ancient hotel, Red Lion Inn, identified as the oldest continuous hotel in England. The original building was constructed in the 1200’s to house workmen building the Cathedral. I have no ancestors that I am aware of in Wiltshire, but Russ does, and he claims St. Thomas Church in the city center as one of his ancestral churches.

Russ and I will be visiting Great Britain again this spring, spending three weeks in Cornwall and Devon and continuing our research into the Eastlick/Eastlake name(s). We have visited and researched in Cornwall on nine trips between 1995 and 2010, and did extensive research in Devon in 2010. We have been to the Bodmin Church (St Petroc) each time, and the last trip in 2010 we discovered, quite by accident, the Eastlake Farm near Bratton Clovelly in Devon. With the Eastlick Name Project in Family Tree DNA I hope to begin to trace the Eastlick/Eastlake lines more definitively to these and other locations in Great Britain. On most of our trips we have kept a journal. This trip I hope to blog about any new information we may discover as well as sharing the joy of being in my second homeland.